Monthly Archives: July 2011

The Sprit of ’76

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This month we mark the 35th anniversary of the opening of the National Air and Space Museum building on July 1, 1976. To tell the truth, my memories of the months leading up to that moment are something of a blur. I reported to work at the Museum for the first time on February 4, 1974. As junior member of the Astronautics Department, my boss was Frederick C. Durant, III, an engineer and certified space cadet who had served as President of both the American Rocket Society and the International Astronautical Federation and was a key advisor to the U.S. military, intelligence, and civilian space-flight programs of the 1950s and ’60s. Fred had come to the museum in 1964 to lead it into the Space Age. Close to four decades later, he remains one of the best bosses I have ever had.

When I arrived at the National Air and Space Museum, Astro, as we called our department, consisted of just four curator/subject matter specialists and two support staff, shoe-horned into the northeast tower of the Arts and Industries Building, with a splendid view of the dumpster in the parking lot of the building (the target for empty soda cans tossed from the second story window on slow Friday afternoons) and the dust cloud rising from the construction site next door where the Hirshhorn Museum was being built. The space kept getting smaller as we added another curator and two more support staff by the time we moved into the office areas of the new building in the spring of 1975.

Smithsonian South Yard in 1974. The Arts and Industries building with "Rocket Row" along the west side is visible to the right. The white hut at center is the Air and Space Building, which was torn down after moving into the new National Air and Space Museum in 1976. Credit: Smithsonian Institution Archives

We were obviously focused on collecting objects and planning the galleries that would fill the new building on opening day. We got something of a head start while we were still at the A&I building – planning and producing a series of trial versions of exhibitions that would be included in the new building. If memory serves, these mini exhibits included: World War I Aviation, Exhibition Flight, Balloons and Airships, Life in the Universe, and Apollo to the Moon. While we were never able to “moth ball” these preview exhibitions and transfer them directly into the new setting, it did at least give us a real opportunity to develop the ideas and the general plan for what visitors would see on opening day.

The Lunar Module and the Wright 1909 Military Plane being prepared to be moved out of the North Hall of the Arts and Industries Building, August 1975. Credit: Smithsonian Institution Archives

Michael Collins, Command Module Pilot of Apollo 11, was the director of the museum, a fact in which all of us took genuine pride. At the same time there was never any doubt in our minds that Mike’s deputy, Mel Zisfien, was the guy looking over our shoulders. Mel managed the process of gallery development and watched over the team of curators, designers and fabricators who were creating the galleries. Suffice to say that Mel was both a big picture kind of guy, and a detail man who demanded to be kept up to the minute with regard to our progress, or lack of same. Looking back over the gulf of years what I most remember is the collection of incredibly bright, talented, and energetic — if sometime quirky and exasperating — people who populated the National Air and Space Museum staff in the months, weeks, and days leading up to the opening. It was a privilege to be included in their number.

Tom Crouch is senior curator in the Aeronautics Division of the National Air and Space Museum.

A New Curiosity

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There is a strange looking car parked in the west end of the National Air and Space Museum in downtown Washington, DC. For now, it is only visible behind its security screen from the second floor landing above. From that vantage, the vehicle’s six wheels, robotic arm, mast, and other protrusions are clearly visible. But since this is the Air and Space Museum, it must be more than just a normal car.

Soon the barriers will be gone and the public will be able to view the vehicle up close and personal. And what they will see is a model of the next Mars rover, NASA’s 2011 Mars Science Laboratory. The rover, dubbed “Curiosity” will be launched to Mars later this year and will begin its mission to explore whether places on the Red Planet were ever habitable. Information on the mission can be found at: http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/. The rover carries a suite of instruments geared towards understanding conditions on the planet and a full description of the payload can be found at: http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/instruments/.

NASA Mars Rover Curiosity at JPL, Side View. The rover for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, named Curiosity, is about 3 meters (10 feet) long, not counting the additional length that the rover's arm can be extended forward. The front of the rover is on the left in this side view. The arm is partially raised but not extended. Rising from the rover deck just behind the front wheels is the remote sensing mast. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The landing site for Curiosity will be one of four final candidate sites all deemed to possess a variety of features suited to evaluating whether Mars could have been habitable in the past. It is expected that NASA will announce the landing site in the coming weeks. Much more information on the landing sites proposed for Curiosity can be found at: http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/landingsites/index.html.

The model of Curiosity will be on display through Labor Day of this year.

See the model of Curiosity and learn more about its mission at this year’s Mars Day! on July 22.

John Grant is a geologist in the Museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies and co-chair of the Mars Landing site steering committee leading the MSL landing site selection process.

35 Years at the National Air and Space Museum

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When I began to work at the National Air and Space Museum in March 1975, I was the Museum’s sole reference librarian, having graduated from Catholic University of America with an M.S. in Library Science the previous year. I had only been working for a few weeks, when I was told that we’d be moving from our Arts and Industries Building location to a brand new facility down the street. My boss, a professional of some standing in the librarian community, knew her job well, but she didn’t know much about moving a library, so it was up to me and one of my stalwart colleagues, a guy named Bill Jackson, whom some old-timers will remember fondly, to figure out how to box everything up and move it less than a city block away.

 

Arts and Industries

Rocket Row along the west side of the Arts and Industries Building before the National Air and Space Museum was built.

We wouldn’t open the new Museum to the public until the next year—July 1976, but the goal was to get everything into the newly-constructed building by end of summer 1975 so we could be fully operational for the official opening. That meant a lot of preparation—trying to figure out, in our case, how to pack books and other library materials, and label the containers so that we knew what we had at the other end. Another consideration was conservation. We were told that we had to attend a briefing given by Dr. Robert M. Organ, chief of the Conservation Analytical Laboratory, a predecessor of what is now the Museum Conservation Institute. I don’t remember much about the lecture, except the upshot, which was that we were to place in every box that was to be moved, a square of cotton gauze into which would be put a scoop of moth crystals (I’m not sure exactly how much); the gauze would then be tied with string. (It looked like a bizarre moth crystal wedding favor.) The moth crystals would prevent any live insects from being transported in the boxes that traveled from one place to the other. So before anything could actually be moved we had to prepare what seem liked hundreds—maybe even thousands—of these little containers of moth crystals.

 

The day was set in May 1975 for the production of the moth crystal packets. We had everybody involved, staff, interns, and whomever else we could corral into doing the odious—and odoriferous—task. We formed an assembly line; some people cut the gauze, some people put the crystals into the gauze squares, and some people collected the packets and placed them into large cardboard containers. The Arts and Industries Building wasn’t air conditioned, so we opened all the doors and windows and turned on two giant fans, but to no avail. The smell of moth crystals hung heavily in the air for what seemed like forever. It took us a couple of weeks, but we produced what we thought were enough of the packets so that one could be placed in every box to be moved. (Some of this process was done in a less-than-scientific way, so we may have missed some boxes.) We went home every evening reeking of moth crystals and were unable to get that smell out of our nostrils. I began to wonder why in the world I ever took the job.

 

An evening in July was chosen for the move. The movers were mostly college students hired by a local moving company who had little or no idea of what they were doing. We spent an entire summer’s night loading the boxes into the moving van, removing them at the other end, and hauling them up to the space in the west end of the building where the library would be. Around 10:00 pm, the moving boys decided they needed a beer break and dispersed to who knows where. At 10:30 or so, some of them hadn’t returned, but we couldn’t wait. We just went on without them. Somehow we managed to get everything transferred. By the time we opened the last of the boxes, sometime at the end of summer, we discovered that the moth crystals had evaporated!

 

National Air and Space Museum

The National Air and Space Museum being constructed ca. 1974. Opening its doors on July 1, 1976, the National Air and Space Museum quickly became the most popular museum in the world.

 

By October the library was up and running, and even though the Museum was still under construction and you couldn’t go anywhere outside the third floor without a hard hat, we were answering mail and telephone calls—no visitors yet, of course. The day of the opening came on July 1, 1976, and we had no idea of the horde of visitors who wanted to use the library (no appointments were necessary in those days). We were literally overrun, but it was a good feeling because after so much work, the place was a success. To this day, I can’t go near a moth crystal without thinking of my earliest days at the National Air and Space Museum.

 

dom

The author (second from left) shortly after he became a curator at the National Air and Space Muesum, at the September 1982 opening of the exhibition Black Wings: The American Black in Aviation. Other staff and volunteers who worked on the exhibition are from left to right Louis R. Purnell, Lou Lomax, Edna Owens, Von Hardesty, and Ted Robinson (Federal Aviation Administration).

 

 

 

 

Dominick A. Pisano is a curator in the Aeronautics Division of the National Air and Space Museum.